Last night I was chatting with some folks in the Loot discord about our new NFT project Hypercastle Explorers. Loot impresario and community “Lord of Lore(lol)” timshel.eth invited me to share the story of Hypercastle Explorers and graciously set up a hyperverse channel there for us to begin to build connections across our shared imaginary worlds.

Below is the (extremely) lightly edited but still raw story that came tumbling out at timshel’s prompt.

The entire conversation can be viewed in it’s original unedited form on the Loot Discord here.

1. timshel🔮

   All right, I made this channel for for sharing projects, stories, insights, and ideas beyond Loot and around the Hyperverse

2. [9:58 PM]@Matto kick us off with a Hypercastle Explorers story?

3. Matto: thanks for setting this up!

4. [10:07 PM]
   🤔
   yeah appreciate the invitation. Where to start!

5. *[10:18 PM]*First of all, I'm a huge believer in the ethos and vision of Loot and of an open hyperverse. 10,000 years ago back in September I made this slightly manifesto-ish video essay about Loot just as things were getting started for my YouTube channel.

   https://youtu.be/j7yYrslqIkg

6. *[10:20 PM]*The first thing that I wanted to work on in the Loot community was maps, because I've spent a bit of time creating 2d map generators myself for off-chain game projects. Here's an example of one, built in Unity.

1. [10:22 PM] I met @threepwave here in this Discord, and he was working on (what would become) Crypts and Caverns early on, and I realized that we had shared goals and so we started to collaborate, and I started to give some input and advice on what later became C&C, specifically around how to format the map data. And @dom also gave us some advice on how best to turn the map code we were imagining into something that would function on chain.
2. [10:24 PM] I got busy with non-crypto projects and drifted off for a bit, but was following along casually. At some point Terraforms popped up on my radar and it was directly focused on the things I was most interested in: abstract, procedural map making with strong influences from classic procedural worlds like Dwarf Fortress, but also with a wild and colorful aesthetic.
3. [10:25 PM]

1. [10:26 PM] I had the feeling that I sometimes have where another artist has just come along and done the thing you wanted to do already, which is a weird mix of delight, jealousy and fascination. And as I started to realize that Terraforms was not just a series of 2D maps but a massive floating 3D map I saw an opportunity to contribute and use my skills as a game developer and real-time 3d person.

2. [10:28 PM] I worked with folks in the Terraforms discord to scrape the data from the contract into the Unity game engine and created a video called The Long View, a 3d animation which visualizes the Terraforms hyperstructure at one level of detail

3. [10:28 PM] That full video is viewable on YouTube here:

   https://youtu.be/lQLAs2AIev4

4. [10:29 PM] This video shows each Terraform parcel as a cube in the floating hypercastle, but doesn't show the level of detail shown in the map above, that's abstracted away.

5. [10:29 PM] I, and others in the Terraforms community, really wanted to see the whole thing with both the macro and micro levels of detail, and be able to explore it.

6. [10:31 PM] The Terraforms devs @0x113d and xAltgeist both made it clear that while at some point they were definitely thinking about 3d views it wasn't imminent and as a 2 person team they had other things they were working on, so I started trying to figure out if it would be possible to get a more ambitious project together.

7. [10:32 PM] I had made The Long View over Christmas break more or less, but once vacation was over I had a bunch of work and responsibilities and knew I couldn't commit to a project of that scale without clearing out a big chunk of my schedule, and also pulling in the developers who work with me at my company Thousand Ant.

8. [10:33 PM] We started talking with folks in the Terraforms community including the devs and discussing various ways to make a bigger project happen, considering a Juicebox campaign and similar approaches, but I realized that this being the NFT space, probably the most "native" or appropriate way to gather funds was to do an NFT project ourselves.

9. [10:35 PM] The first idea was actually to just "fractionalize" the existing The Long View video and break it into a mix of stills and video segments, and use that as the art for an NFT collection, but in talking with folks we realized that that might have made it seem too much like that visual was what we were trying to build or that that was somehow the "canonical" 3d representation of the hypercastle which it isn't.

10. [10:36 PM] We had set a goal of building what we were calling a "Unity SDK for Terraforms" basically a set of base libraries to make it easier for game devs to build realtime, interactive 2d and 3d experiences and games using the Terraforms data. In those talks the idea came up of somehow representing the software SDK we wanted to build itself, and we started playing with ideas of software boxes and other media containers.

1. [10:37 PM] My first idea was to do some kind of fake "product viz" shots of software boxes, maybe in some kind of anachronistic style, like late 90s mac software packaging (RIP Hypercard 🖤)
2. timshel🔮 : 📜🍿
3. Matto: but the more I experimented the more I started to realize I wanted to create something less 1:1 and linear and a bit more abstract. I started playing around with all kinds of digital info storage images, the first one being a CD case.

2. [10:39 PM] I started to work with single screen grabs of the Terraform images, and also the color palettes encoded in each Terraforms zone.

3. timshel🔮Haha you’re gonna convince me to mint more

   Matto: I found that they worked really well as "key art" featuring them where photos would normally be in a design, but also as texture and color

4. [10:40 PM]

1. [10:41 PM] also zooming in on the images (which we sampled from their SVG format in 4k resolution) and featuring the unique font characters in each biome produced beautiful results. Terraforms themselves incorporate what are known as "Droste" effects or pictures within pictures, and so that became a visual theme in the art.
2. [10:42 PM]
3. Editors side note on Droste effects in Terraforms, quoting from the Terraforms community FAQ:

”**9neonlines#9418 (with help from 0x0112#0654) finally discovered that, “some terrains on each level are mini maps of their entire level…This is enabled by a coded Droste effect such that a few terrains showcase the entirety of their levels map (think like a "keystone" map of a given level).”

This addresses a long-standing mystery in the Terraforms universe! Terra Spine (Keystones) (PlayPeng909#3739) provides a list of known ones. More information about the levels they reflect is awaiting confirmation.”**

2. [10:43 PM] The more I worked with the images the deeper my admiration for the underlying work grew, and the more I realized how interesting the possibilities for "composability" were on an aesthetic and visual level, as well as on a software level.

3. [10:45 PM] Me and my team at Thousand Ant got to work and wrote an application using the Unity game engine to generate 1024 unique images, each one referencing and incorporating one of 1024 unique Terraform IDs, it's zone colors, biome characters and image.

4. [10:46 PM] We wrote a proposal which we shared on the Hypercastle Explorers Discord to explain exactly how we wanted to run the process of building the SDK, what we'd do, not do, when we'd do it and so on. We really wanted to stand apart from some of the snake-oil vaporware talk that gets peddled in the NFT space and offer something with a clear and concrete scope, inspired by our company background doing contract work for big traditional tech companies like Google and Unity.

5. [10:47 PM] and then last night we launched our presale, and tonight our public mint, and I'm delighted to say we've raised 52.3 ETH (ed note: at time of writing, currently higher) which will allow us to move next week onto production planning for the SDK!

6. *[10:48 PM]*and that brings us up to the present

7. [10:48 PM](mostly lol)

8. *[10:48 PM]*thanks for the prompt @timshel🔮 I realize I definitely don't have all this written down in one place. Now it's here.

9. timshel🔮

   Haha awesome — maybe distill into a Mirror post too now that you did 90% of the work ha

[END]

Thanks again to timshel for the prompt to write this (and post it here!) and thank you to everyone who’s supported us up to this point. We’re just getting started.